Good news: The flight engineer panels are nearing completion.
Bad news: The entire cockpit now comes in at 40k vertices (compared to 10k before I started on the flight engineer panel). I still have yet to start work on the circuit breakers and the top panel.
I am still considering whether to reduce the number of vertices as most of it comes from the rounded switches of which the meshes can be simplified and linked.

Beginner ATC for hire!Current Projects:
-Pilatus PC12
-Mooney M20
-New England SceneryFine Print:**Word of Caution**
My knowledge is limited. Anything I write in my posts may or may not be accurate. To be honest I think its all crap.

The rounded switches that were previously used were defined with 16 vertex circles. However, I soon decided that using 8 vertices would suffice, given the exploding vertex count and that with such small switches the difference in definition would be insignificant.
Linking the meshes would mean that in the dnm file, the srf is defined once, then at the end of the dnm file, the srf is referenced more than once to create more than one object. This is done through Alt-D in Blender. While this does not decrease vertex count, it can create massive savings in the dnm file, as identical parts can be referenced from a single srf. Look here for decaff's explanation (point 2).

I spent 1.5-2 hours doing this mesh cleanup and saved about 6-7k vertices, and this will be even more significant in the eventual dnm.

More progress.
Finished up the flight engineer panel, some minor switches beside the glareshield I skipped on my Boneyard models and the main pedestal behind the throttle quadrant. More importantly, so have the yoke and rudder pedals. The yoke has the McDD logo as well (if you zoom in). I've also made the trim knobs decently detailed. Once I'm done with the throttle quadrant itself I will move on to the top panel, and subsequently will be imported into the main dnm for final touches before repaints (finally).
A small note: the cockpit as it is stands at 45k vertices, almost as much as the main DC-10 dnm (57k vertices). I wasn't really expecting a 100k vertex model but

I remember the time when I was cautious about installing the O.C.P pack because the F/A-18C Hornet made by S.C contained a "detailed" cockpit. Fearing my sis's 2008 lappy couldn't run em I went with the low detailed alternative provided in the addon files.

Well, after acquiring a much better rig and finding out I can run anything made by Lordflash at a reasonable framerate my fears were finally put to rest.

Apart from some minor cosmetic tweaks, the cockpit is finally done.
The quadrant and top panel have a decent level of detail, and the controls are fully animated, though I have skipped out on the actual circuit breakers. You can open the original image of the 1st image in its 6000x3375 resolution and zoom in on individual dials and switches. However, this also means that the whole thing is hideously vertex-heavy, and now stands at a whopping 60k vertices. On its own, the dnm is 3.2MB large, and when combined with the main DC-10 dnm, the whole thing stands at 110k vertices and around 6MB. To be frank if I didn't know the vertex count beforehand I wouldn't have known that it would even hit 50k because honestly it doesn't look as detailed as I want it to be... am I just looking at it wrong guys?